Monday, October 15, 2012

And What About Masochistic Children? (Guest Post by Antonio Haynes)

Today's guest post is by Antonio Haynes, currently a Visiting Fellow at Cornell Law School. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And What About
Masochistic Children?

By Antonio Haynes

In my guest column
today on Verdict, I discuss the recent controversy in Texas surrounding a male
vice principal’s corporally punishing two female students. In the column, I argue that the perceived
“creepiness” of a male administrator paddling female students stems from a
widely held, but often unstated assumption that eroticized violence is deeply
problematic. I conclude that when they
implicitly raised the possibility of sadistic school administrators, the girls
and their mothers tapped into an insidious fear of sexual deviance that
completely distracted the conversation from the real issue at hand—the
tremendous levels of actual violence that corporal punishment necessarily
entails.

To highlight the way
in which the unstated assumption about eroticized violence operates, I offered
a “bizarre” hypothetical school-board policy that would require that school
officials of a different sexual orientation spank students. “In other words,” I said, “it would be
permissible for a lesbian to paddle heterosexual male students, for a
homosexual male to paddle heterosexual female students, for a heterosexual woman
to paddle gay male students, and for a heterosexual male to paddle lesbian
students.”

Careful readers immediately notice that the examples I give
do not remove the possibility of eroticized violence. For instance, it would still be “creepy,” to
allow a heterosexual male to spank a lesbian student, because the lesbian
student is a female, the sex to which the heterosexual administrator is
attracted. The only way my hypothetical
policy could actually remove the possibility of sadistic school officials deriving
sexual pleasure from paddling students would be for the policy to require consideration
of the sex and sexual orientation of
the school official. Stated differently,
the reformed hypothetical policy would necessarily require that derelict girls
be beaten by either gay male or straight female administrators.Similarly, miscreant boys would have to be paddled
by lesbians or straight men.

I intentionally framed the hypothetical in this way. In my view, the hypothetical policy subtly
acknowledged the manner in which the identities of gay, lesbian, and bisexual
school officials are not adequately accounted for in debates about the
interactions between school officials and students of different sexes. If it is it is true that opposite sex
spankings cause a fear of eroticized violence, then failing to account for
differences in sexual orientation only exacerbates the possibility. Further, both the original and reformed
hypothetical policies completely elide the identities of gender nonconforming
or transsexual administrators.

But another, more overlooked, reason that both the original
and modified hypothetical policies fail to adequately remove the possible
“creepiness,” of spanking is that both policies fail to contend with the fact
that the corporal punishment might arouse the students. Recall that here, the students were older
teenagers and that at least one of them chose paddling over in-school
suspension. Despite societal unease with
adolescent sexuality, we know that
many older teenagers regularly engage in sexual activity. We also know that, despite the strongly held
opprobrium that attaches to eroticized violence, many individuals
freely admit to practicing sadomasochism.
Taken together, these statistics suggest that a not insignificant fraction
of perfectly “normal” older teenagers are sexually activity and practicing sadomasochism. The possibility of a sadistic school
administrator deriving sexual gratification from beating students is just as
likely as the possibility of masochistic students who seek sexual pleasure in
being beaten.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that either homosexuality
or interest in sadomasochism represent sexual deviance. Neither sexual orientation nor
deviance ought to “be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries
to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to
uncover.” But the failure to openly
acknowledge the myriad reasons for our possible discomfort with corporal
punishment highlights the impoverished nature of our discussions about teens,
sex, and sexual orientation. This
failure is itself a distraction because it hinders correction of our sexually
dysfunctional society while simultaneously entrenching real violence. This is not a course we should take.

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